RIM has started to slash prices for its little-loved BlackBerry PlayBook tablet in the US amid channel talk on this side of the pond that the fondleslabs are shifting more slowly than expected and inventory levels are out of control.
The troubled Canadian firm is taking a lead from HP which saw demand for its TouchPad go through …

the playbook is the tablet I'd go for if I had the money, perhaps bringing the price down will make that a bit easier to afford. I for one don't find the idea of tethering the way it's done as a problem. If anything it's a bonus, not paying for two data contracts plus if it's lost/stolen no data left behind to pilfer.

Spooky

My shop is vehemently anti-Apple and pro-BB, they don't want the grief of maintaining iTunes libraries on desktops or letting the wally users just grab apps themselves but after a big fan-fare about going BB PlayBook the testing proved that PlayBook was a bit of a "lame-nag"!

No sympathy

I really am not at all surprised. They were selling a not-a-ipad for the price of an ipad, and expecting to carve a slice of market action. Just like HP, they were greedy. I've written on here before about my old Dad's dictum, that to compete with the market leader you have to be one or both of:

* twice as good

* half the price

Because they have already done the hard work before you and taken the high ground.

I really hope that this is the end of Mee-toooo engineering.

It has been all too aparant in the world of digital cameras where man+dog was making the same indistinguishable box for drunken office girls to point at each other in italian restaurants. That was a long tradition of copying going back to the days of the Instamatic, and it sort of worked for cameras because you could buy one and it worked and you didn't need anything else.

Fondlepads are not like that. They are part of a system. It's like trying to sell dodgem cars when no-one has put up the chicken wire for the electric supply.

I am sick of people saying "there is a proven market of X million, if we get 15% of that it is Y million". For heavens sake, lads, go out and invent something for yourselves.

Where is my voice-based computer? what about a way to get the BBC radio while driving through poland? Why aren't all the new phones dual- or triple- sim? What about a bonephone layer on the head? spectacles with zoom lenses? What about a camera with IR visualisation for spotting people with a fever? What happened to data gloves? eye movement tracking instead of a mouse (all you need is two cameras on a notebook)

Or even some boring peripherals? what about a printer and scanner the same size as an ipad, that will do a sheet or two at a time? Remember home automation? temperature indicating tableware? Where are the standing stair lifts, the cycle detectors for the left side of large vehicles? What about private family networks on phones, a sort of always-on walkie talkie with intercontinental range? and position tracking? gadgets to weigh things or measure them in 3D? Cheap domestic solid printers? electric cycle retrofits? Why do cars have the same key on every door, central locking, and remote openers, and houses don't? Where is my pocket device to scan bank notes for forgeries? a minature soldering station for reflow soldering IC packages? peltier based spot heating or cooling for foodstuffs? domestic energy recycling for b athwater and flue gasses? a method of keeping next door's cat from using the flower beds as a latrine? linked watches, so you can remind yer partner of an appointment, or know what direction they are in some cavernous shopping mall? Cheap space flight? window glass that goes reflective in hot weather? an UV based bacteria scanner for domestic and catering food preparation surfaces?

There are still a billion things to invent. Stop bloody copying the latest fad and use some brains for a change!

@No sympathy -- For a while i thought...

You would start saying something about 'British engineering' and 'in charge of the world' -- especially after this statement

what about a way to get the BBC radio while driving through poland?

I think you forgot to copy/paste that other email, something about the mysteries of life -- why is abbreviation such a long word, what is the name of the plastic things at the end of your shoe laces,

etc. etc.

Chill - take a breath, then a beer. Almost Friday. Hang in there.

As far as the bbc radio in Poland -- have some company invest in a number of satellites, and set up a radio service similar to SiriusXM. Simple as that, right? There's probably a nice market study about that one ;-)

Frontline's not strong enough.

You would need the 3x more costly (with shorter, but much wider effectiveness) Advocate instead.

I think a simpler approach is to revive the myth that fleas are a sign of health*. YMMV.

(*The nazi camp doctors believed that if you were really at death's door, fleas will desert you -- so at times they let those with fleas live in preference over those without. And subsequently killed all anyhow as far as capacity would allow.)

A sales winner.

Slash it to £80-£100, accidentally leak a way to load 'proper' Android (presumably Honeycomb or ICS) onto the net, offload tens of thousands. Espesh if RIM then released an app which gave full BES compatibility.

I agree it's an unintuitive device

I tried one in PCW a few weeks back. It's so difficult to use I could not get it out of the music player application it appeared to be stuck in, nor could i turn it off and on to see if that fixed things.

All about the bezels.

It's basically all controlled through the bezels at the top and bottom of the device (when you set up the device for the first time there is a tutorial that you have to run through which explains it, but you won't have seen it if the device was already configured.

You swipe up from the bottom bezel towards the middle to minimise the currently open app. It shrinks it down into a small box in the middle of the screen and from here you can switch between other running apps, or close them.

Swiping down to the middle from the top bezel brings up the options menus while in apps, though for most of them there seem to be very few options to change.

Flash aaaahhhhhaaaaa!

Flash? Naa-aaah!

Iknorite? I though that if that was all that was good enough about it to make the adverts, then they were beyond the event horizon of screwed. Blackberry are circling the drain, and have been for months. Release their BBM and mail cleverness as an Android and iPhone app, and leave the hardware and OS manufacture to those that know what they're doing.

Junk Kit

The idiotic Co- CEO's probably thought the Playbook would be a great stealth plan to sell more Blackberry's, since the thing is useless without one. The Kindle Fire will sell because it fills it's intended purpose, an e-reader with a web browser, whereas this piece of junk kit "PLAYBOOK", was designed to be useless without a Blackberry. The idiots ignore the fact that not everyone has or even wants a Blackberry. Stupid plan. Junk Kit. They can lower it to the same $100 that the Touchpad sold for bit there will not be a frenzy to buy, for anyone who doesn't have a Blackberry and Blackberry users have already yawned at this thing.

I suspect that either one or both of RIM's Co- CEO's may be on the chopping block soon, like Leo was over at HP.

Maybe cos

there are not many people who have an iPad who don't have an iPhone they thought they there would be the same sort of fanatacism amongst the Blackberry fans but I think the 'Crackberry' has had it's day. It was everywhere in the US for a while, then the texters over here made use of them while they were cheap at 3 and vodafone etc but as someone else's dad said above, it needed to be either twice as good and half the price to compete with the iPad, not the same price and half as good.

Shame really. I thought that they might be the ones to compete but it seems that Apple will be at the top of this market they created for a while yet.

Playbook

I think everyone has forgotten the point of the PB

As I understand it the PB was targeted at the coroporate environment. The reasone the PB is tethered to a BB is to ensure that the device never holds any sensitive coporate data. As soon as its out of BlueTooth range, its just a semi decent tablet.

I appreciate that the iPad is a far superior experience, but the controls around remote wipe are immature and dependent on Apple services and they are playing catch up to RIM in that respect.

I have been testing a PB for some time now and I do agree that for the most part its a toe dip into the pad marketform by RIM but I am sure that if the tethered mail client gets features that at least match those found on the BB and its more nativelyt supported by the BES, it will be a decent alternative.

Just No

if mail client gets feature

Overpriced

I got one of these for free, back when they were giving them away to developers who made apps before their app store opened. Its actually a pretty decent device, but I'd never pay the current asking price for it. Maybe half this price would be fair, especially considering the low cost of the pending Kindle Flame.

Disappointing

I bought one for my wife as she has a blackberry. I've got a Motorola xoom. The blackberry has some nice features, but is on the whole disappointing. Not a lot in the app world and very few free titles. With the exception of docs to go, which is free on the blackberry but is paid for on the android market(if you want the version that allows you to edit documents), apps on the blackberry are being charged for that free equivalents are available for on android or are more expensive than their paid for android counterpart. Astonishingly the Chinese IME, which allows Chinese text to be entered costs £3. Free on all versions of Windows, Mac OS, Linux and Android. Way to go RIM, alienate one fifth of the world population from your market.